US To Move Its Embassy In Israel To Jerusalem

Update: As of yesterday evening, it appeared that the President would in fact sign another six-month waiver of the law requiring the US embassy to be in Jerusalem but that he would “declare” (I assume the article really means “recognize”) that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Who knows if that’s the final view, so this post may be subject to further updates.

President Trump has told Palestinian President Abbas and King Abdullah II of Jordan of his intention to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s too soon to tell what exactly the President means. Is a move imminent? Was President Trump just trying to stir the pot as though the Middle East were a reality TV show where drama drives ratings? But let’s not make this a post about the President. Let’s look at the substance.

There is no plausible solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict that does not result in Jerusalem as the capital of Israel except for the “from the river to the sea” one-state solution that would mean the end of the Jewish state. So what the President has signaled is not just a recognition of what is an obvious fact—that Jerusalem is, in fact, the capital of the State of Israel—but a recognition of something that everyone who claims to want a peace deal knows will be included in the peace deal.

“But you’re prejudging the outcome of the negotiations!” The United States has always treated the status of Jerusalem as a final status issue to be negotiated between the parties. So why should the United States recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital now? Well, what is the status of the negotiations between the parties? Israel has said for years that it wants direct negotiations without preconditions. The Palestinians have said for years they want direct negotiations, but only if Israel meets certain preconditions. Of these, the main problem seems to be a precondition that the two sides “will agree on a specific timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.” It’s not clear to me precisely what this means, but borders are a key issue that the United States says should be negotiated between the parties, so I think the criticism carries little weight. In other words, I don’t see how you have standing to complain about prejudging issues that are to be decided in negotiations if you say that the other side must concede issues that are to be decided in negotiations before the negotiations even start!Let me add that presumably the status of the western part of Jerusalem is not really up for debate, or at least it shouldn’t be. (Note: The US position is that no one is recognized as sovereign over any part of Jerusalem at present. And it’s a fair to criticize the Trump administration for changing US policy on this important question, at least without consulting expert foreign policy opinion. That said, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians think that Jerusalem should be a corpus separatum or an international city at the end of the day, and so I don’t see much weight in this point.) The western part of the city is within the Green Line, i.e., Israel’s borders after its war of independence. Even those who say they want a return to the 1967 borders don’t want Israel to relinquish western Jerusalem. This does make me wonder what the fuss is about, since the US consulate, which is potentially the building the United States would convert into an embassy, is in West Jerusalem.

“But Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims!” Agreed! And it’s a holy city to Christians. You might be excused for forgetting that it’s a holy city—the holy city, really—for Jews, given the Palestinians’ shameful refusal to acknowledge what everyone in the world knows. Let me quote for a moment, because you might not believe me if I merely paraphrased:

Palestinian officials are demanding an apology from the new United Nations chief after he said it was “completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also told Israel Radio in an interview Friday with its New York correspondent that “no one can deny the fact that Jerusalem is holy to three religions today,” including Judaism.

On Sunday, Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Affairs minister, told the Chinese news service Xinhua that Guterres “ignored UNESCO’s decision that considered the Al-Aqsa mosque of pure Islamic heritage.” He also said Guterres “violated all legal, diplomatic and humanitarian customs and overstepped his role as secretary general … and must issue an apology to the Palestinian people.”

Xinhua also spoke with an adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmad Majdalani, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who said that Guterres’s comments “undermine the trustworthiness of the UN as a body that should support occupied peoples” and that Guterres “should clarify his remarks that give Israel a green light for more measures against Jerusalem.”

You might also be excused for forgetting that prior to the Six Day War, Jews were denied access to the Western Wall by Jordan, while under Israeli rule the management of the Temple Mount itself has been left to the Islamic Waqf. And you might be excused for forgetting that Israel cooperates with the Waqf to ensure that only Muslims are allowed to pray on the Temple Mount itself (though Jewish religious opinion generally forbids Jews from going up to the Temple Mount lest they accidentally set foot on the site of the ancient Holy of Holies).

“But Jerusalem is the future capital of the Palestinian state!” I hope that’s true! It seems to me that at the end of the day, the two parties are going to have to find a way to share Jerusalem. That’s going to require hard compromises and creative thinking on both sides. We haven’t seen any sort of clear statement from the Trump Administration, but presumably recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital does not preclude establishment of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem as part of the final status negotiations. I hope that President Trump’s announcement, when it comes, will not alter the status quo regarding the US view on Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem after the Six Day’s War, which is clearly one of the very fraught issues that the parties themselves will have to work out. I have to say that I don’t really understand what the Palestinians say about the religious centrality of Jerusalem for them in light of the little I know or think I know about Islam (and I recognize that not all Palestinians are Muslims—some are Christians), but I accept that they say what they say with sincerity, and so Israel will have to find a way to accommodate them in negotiations if there is ever to be a deal.

“But if you do this, the Palestinians will have Days of Rage and violence will follow!” This is the heart of the matter. I described this as the “Arab World freakout hypothesis” in my post on the Zivatofsky case, the case about whether an Israeli born in Jerusalem had the right to have his place of birth recorded as “Israel” in his US passport. Yes, this is a serious concern, but it’s a practical concern. It’s probably the number one reason to suggest that the Trump Administration should cool it. I think if I were President I would want to maintain the status quo, precisely to avoid “Days of Rage,” violence, and even danger to Americans abroad. But in principle, it’s crazy to give weight to this kind of heckler’s veto. If the answer to the Israel/Palestine conflict is to do whatever avoids “days of rage,” or at least if the world announces that that’s the answer, then the Israelis ought to pack it in and decamp for Birobidzhan or somewhere.

So in short: the fear of Palestinian violence is real, and it would be prudent to delay a move, to maintain the status quo, so as to avoid needless violence. That said, as a matter of principle, I think there is a strong case for recognizing what everyone already knows, which is that Jerusalem is and is going to remain the capital of the Jewish state.

I’ve never understood the fuss. Of course Jerusalem is the capital – it’s where the Knesset meets and other government offices are located. I suppose we could say West Jerusalem to acknowledge Palestinian claims to the East, but reality should be considered. Unfortunately, I do think Trump’s primary motive is knowing he will be seen as a jerk by some and he likes it that way.

And eventually it might make sense to recognize other realities too, but wasn’t Jerusalem part of the State of Israel recognized by the UN, not to mention that it is the historical capital going back to King David? I favor recognizing the independence of Taiwan based on reality as well.

No. Jerusalem was not part of the 47′ recognition which deliberately left it as an international city. In reality, it was governed by Jordan and then conquered and illegally annexed by Israel in the 67′ war. An annexation no state has recognized, including the US and an annexation repeatedly condemned at the UN.

As for Taiwan recognizing its independence, such a move would invite war with China. Part of the Nixon deal was recognizing Communist China as the “real” China on the UNSC and as the official China engaging in foreign policy with the United States.

Taiwanese independence is also opposed by most Taiwanese.

Preserving the fiction that Taiwan claims all of the mainland and the mainland claims Taiwan is critical to maintaining peace and security in the region.

Unilateral Taiwanese independence would invite an invasion from the mainland it would surely lose, even if China would probably prefer the status quo.

Right now it has a great bilateral trade and tourism partner it ironically can never recognize as a sovereign state outside itself. And vice a versa. It’s currently difficulties governing Hong Kong after a peaceful transition would be exponentially amplified by the costly military conquest and occupation it would have to endure to reintegrate Taiwan by force. Not to mention the blow to its economy.

A generation from now the last of the KMT holdouts will have died, the last of the PLA hardliners will have also died, and an arrangement similar to the one Deng proposed in the late 80’s would be more amenable to both populations. Perhaps even a deal where both parties drop their claim to the other. Until then, it’s a wink and a nod to fictional sovereignties or war.

To question the legality of Israel’s possession of West Jerusalem is to question the existence of the State of Israel altogether. West Jerusalem is (as the name suggests) west of the Green Line and has been the capital since independence. Of course, you may say that neither Israel nor the Palestinians have any sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem. That would be a defensible position in light of the 1947 UN partition plan (which the Arabs rejected), which referred to Jerusalem as a whole as a corpus separatum, You would then have to say that the Palestinians have no sovereignty over the other towns in the corpus separatum area, including Bethlehem and Abu Dis. If that’s your view, then many happy returns—it may have been a dead letter for seventy years, but at least it makes sense.

But the rights of the people who were forcibly ejected take precedence.

Which is the contention of both sides of this issue: the forcible ejection of the Jews from the region having first taken place in the 7th or 8th century BCE… and repeated several times over the centuries as they sought to get back and were ejected again. Assyrians, Romans, Turks, Crusaders, Brits… the sins of imperialism are with us long after the imperialists themselves have turned to so much dust.

There’s no logical reason left for the United States to put off recognizing the state of Palestine. It was always a weak excuse to say that we had to wait for the negotiations to conclude, or that all parties had to agree before we disturbed the status quo.
Trump ignored all that when he recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

While we’re at it, can we all agree that the basic right of the Palestinian refugees to return is a human right, not a bargaining chip to be played in some future negotiations?
Like the Rohingya today, the Palestinians were driven from their homes by a superior military force, and then blamed for their own exile.

I’m not sure if the Rohingya are the best analogy for the Palestinian situation, since the circumstances of their displacement are very different. The Rohingya are being expelled in an ethnic cleansing specifically targeting them, while the Palestinians were displaced as part of a broader conflict that also displaced many Jews. A better analogy would be the 12—16 million Germans who were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of World War Two.

Throughout the fifties a strong political movement advocated for the rights of the expelled, winning seats in the West German Bundestag and joining the second Adenauer cabinet. While West Germany enacted a generous citizenship law and worked to integrate the refugees into its institutions, it was perfectly willing to abandon any notion of a “right of return” in exchange for political concessions from the eastern bloc. Willy Brandt happily signed away their rights in the various “Ostpolitik” treaties he negotiated in the 70s and Helmut Kohl further confirmed this with the “2 + 4” treaty that cleared the way for German reunification.

If the Right of Return was negotiable for the Germans why shouldn’t be negotiable for the Palestinians too? What is the salient difference in the Palestinian situation that you feel makes this right inalienable? Or were Brandt and Kohl wrong to give the right up? Should the decedents of the Heimatvertriebene have the right to return to Pomerania, Prussia and Silesia?

1. I thought there was quite a bit of freedom of movement within the EU. Are there currently laws on the books preventing ethnic Germans from going there?
2. Brandt and Kohl would have been within their rights to demand that the ethnic Germans be allowed to go back. It may have been wiser not to, but that does not bind the Palestinians. Neither does the fact that Native Americans “agreed” to be confined to reservations mean that Palestinians are bound to agree to live in refugee camps.
3. No analogy is perfect, and you are free to argue that the plight of the Palestinians is more like the ethnic Germans than the Rohingya. I disagree. The Myanmar government claims that they are only fighting terrorism, and that anyway, there is no such thing as the Rohingya–that they are all just Bangladeshi who should go back where they came from. Those are the similarities that seem most salient to me.
4. At any rate, the question isn’t whether the Palestinians can or should negotiate away the right of return. The question is whether the right of return should be unilaterally extinguished by the Israeli government with U. S. backing.

Former colleagues of mine in the State Department may die preventable deaths now that they are terror targets who had almost no warning to prepare their embassy for this shock. Presidents in both parties knew this was a barrier to an eventual peace agreement, no matter what they said to AIPAC to get elected. It is time to get real and acknowledge that the Israeli government is not a willing partner for a two state solution any more. The rest of the world is going to, and the US and Israel will sit alone as our Security Council allies join the Russians and Chinese in denouncing us.

We will get sucked into future quagmires in the Middle East doing the bidding of our client states instead of insisting the relationship should work the other way around. A smart President would reach out to Iran and reward them for their cooperation with trade and integration into the global community. A smart President would use that leverage to get them to dump Assad and terror campaigns and focus on making money. A smart President would tell Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel than the tap of endless money and arms is over and they have to get their act together on human rights. Israel is by far the least offensive of the three, but it’s record toward the occupied territories is appalling and it’s actions as a unilateral bully in the region, working with it’s secret friend Saudi Arabia, have to stop. Or else we won’t have peace.

Shimon Peres is dead, and the spirit of liberal zionism is dying with him. Even John Kerry and Barack Obama, both staunch liberal defenders of Israel, acknowledge this.

That said, this is no time for BDS or defending Hamas or Hezbollah. Or corrupt Palestinian leadership. Or Islamism. There is a better way forward and it will require smart American leadership. This action wasn’t it.

I would add that a smart president might say that the United States is now energy efficient, so if Japan and Germany wish to preserve their needed petroleum supplies, they need to step up in this endeavor. We’re basically paying and dying to protect East Asia’s and Western Europe’s sources of petro.

Yes! Another good point. Trump getting tough on NATO partners was one of the few redeeming differences he had on foreign policy versus the rest of the traditional bipartisan establishment. Of course, he has abandoned that commitment and been manipulated by McMaster and Mattis into recklessly hostile positions on Afghanistan, North Korea, and Iran. And the talk of getting tough on rent seekers has died down.

There’s a good Stephen Walt piece in the latest Foreign Policy that accurately attacks American interventionists in both parties for doing too little to build effective off shore balancing coalitions against China and Russia and too much time trying to remake the Middle East to serve the naïveté of neoconservative and liberal idealists and the realpolitik of client states that no longer share our national interest in the region.

How many more American boys and girls must die fighting in Saudi wars? How much longer can we allow our best friend in the region to drunkenly drive its democracy into a ditch?

TedF also has a bizarre history that omits the fact that the UN in the 47′ settlement recognized Jerusalem as an international city and that no President and no Congress ever recognize the seizure and occupation of lands in the 1967 war. Which includes West Jerusalem. No settlement has ever been legally recognized by any other party, including the American government. Neither has any offensive Israeli campaign from the Suez Crisis to the 67′ war to the Lebanon Wars.

We can debate until the cows come home about who was there longer and who started the conflict. But the choice is either an Arab and Jewish state side by side, a binational state with full voting rights to currently stateless people, or a Jewish minority governing a disenfranchised majority in occupied territory which is the status quo. It may not be apartheid today but it will by 2030 if these trends continue.

At least the Jewish Home party are honest that Israeli citizenship would have to be granted to the people in Zone A and Zone C that they seek to annex. With Zone B has a fig leaf autonomous region. Even that extreme fatalism seems like a fairer status quo than the present reality.

The Economist said Trump should also recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of a recognized Palestinian state. After all, that’s also the reality on the ground.

I feel like I’m the only one not at all convinced of the value of two states. Presumably that means a geographically divided Palestine between West Bank and Gaza. I have a hard time imagining Israel allowing free passage between the two sides or the Palestinians agreeing to restrictions in such passage. Israel would do everything in its power to keep Palestine weak and Palestine would want to build a respectable defense like other sovereign states. IMO there should be a single state with full representation for all parts of the country according to population in the Knesset. Judaism should be official only in Israel proper and WB/GS be afforded broad devolved powers. Of course all persons must be afforded the equal protection of the laws. Added bonus – an indivisible Jerusalem gets to be the capital of an indivisible Palestine!

As I’ve said elsewhere, if your position is that Jerusalem and it’s environs are a corpus separatum, that’s fine, and it’s a legitimate position, but it’s not a position that either side of the conflict holds. And it’s inconsistent with the notion, repeated frequently at the UN and elsewhere, that East Jerusalem is part of the occupied Palestinian territory.